CONCLUSION
At the Close of an Age
A distinction must be drawn, through all our studies of mythology, between the attitudes toward divinities represented on one hand by the priest and his flock, and on the other by the creative poet, artist, or philosopher. The former tends to what I would call a positivistic reading of the imagery of his cult. Such a reading is fostered by the attitude of prayer, since in prayer it is extremely difficult to retain the balance between belief and disbelief that is proper to the contemplation of an image or idea of God. The poet, artist, and philosopher, on the other hand, being themselves fashioners of images and coiners of ideas, realize that all representation — whether in the visible matter of stone or in the mental matter of the word — is necessarily conditioned by the fallibility of the human organs. Overwhelmed by his own muse, a bad poet may imagine his visions to be supernatural facts and so fall into the posture of a prophet — whose utterances I would define as “poetry overdone,” over-interpreted; wherefore he becomes the founder of a cult and a generator of priests. But so also a gifted priest may find his supernatural beings losing body, deepening into void, changing form, even dissolving: whereupon he will possibly become either a prophet or, if more greatly favored, a creative poet.
Three major metamorphoses of the motifs and themes of our subject, therefore, have to be recognized as fundamentally differing even though fundamentally related, namely: the true poetry of the poet, the poetry overdone of the prophet, and the poetry done to death of the priest. Whereas the history of religion is largely a record of the latter two, the history of mythology includes all three, and in doing so brings not only poetry but also religion into a fresh and healthily vivified relationship to the wellsprings of creative thought. For there is in poetry a tendency (“poetry underdone”) to rest in the whimsies of personal surprise, joy, or anguish before the realities of life in a universe poets never made; whereas in religion the opposite tendency may prevail — that of rendering no personal experience whatsoever, but only authorized clichés.
In the long view of the history of mankind, four essential functions of mythology can be discerned. The first and most distinctive — vitalizing all — is that of eliciting and supporting a sense of awe before the mystery of being. Professor Rudolf Otto has termed this recognition of the numinous the characteristic mental state of all religions properly so called.Note 1 It antecedes and defies definition. It is, on the primitive level, demonic dread; on the highest, mystical rapture; and between there are many grades. Defined, it may be talked about and taught; but talk and teaching cannot produce it. Nor can authority enforce it. Only the accident of experience and the sign symbols of a living myth can elicit and support it; but such signs cannot be invented. They are found. Whereupon they function of themselves. And those who find them are the sensitized, creative, living minds that once were known as seers, but now as poets and creative artists. More important, more effective for the future of a culture than its statesmen or its armies are these masters of the spiritual breath by which the clay of man wakes to life.
The second function of mythology is to render a cosmology, an image of the universe that will support and be supported by this sense of awe before the mystery of a presence and the presence of a mystery. The cosmology has to correspond, however, to the actual experience, knowledge, and mentality of the culture folk involved. So we note that when the priestly watchers of the skies in ancient Sumer, c. 3500 b.c., learned of die order of the planets, the entire mythic system of the nuclear Near East stepped away from the simple primitive themes of the hunting and planting tribes. The grandiose vision of a mathematically impersonal temporal and spatial order came into being, of which the world vision of the Middle Ages — no less than that of ancient India, that of China, and that of Yucatan — was but a late variant. Today that vision has dissolved. And here we touch upon a crucial problem of the religions of our time; for the clergies, generally, still are preaching themes from the first to fourth millenniums b.c.
No one of adult mind today would turn to the Book of Genesis to learn of the origins of the earth, the plants, the beasts, and man. There was no flood, no tower of Babel, no first couple in paradise, and between the first known appearance of men on earth and the first buildings of cities, not one generation (Adam to Cain) but a good two million must have come into this world and passed along. Today we turn to science for our imagery of the past and of the structure of the world, and what the spinning demons of the atom and the galaxies of the telescope’s eye reveal is a wonder that makes the babel of the Bible seem a toyland dream of the dear childhood of our brain.
A third function of mythology is to support the current social order, to integrate the individual organically with his group; and here again, in the long view, we see that a gradual amplification of the scope and content of the group has been the characteristic sign of man’s advance from the early tribal cluster to the modern post-Alexandrian concept of a single world-society. Against the amplitude of this challenging larger concept numerous provinces still stand out, as, for example, those of the various national, racial, religious, or class mythologies, which may once have had their reason but today are out of date.
The social function of a mythology and of the rites by which it is rendered is to establish in every member of the group concerned a “system of sentiments” that can be depended upon to link him spontaneously to its ends. The “system of sentiments” proper to a hunting tribe would be improper to an agricultural one; that proper to a matriarchy is improper to a patriarchy; and that of any tribal group is improper to this day of developed individuals crossing paths from east to west and from north to south.
The older mythic orders gave authority to their symbols by attributing them to gods, to culture heroes, or to some such high impersonal force as the order of the universe; and the image of society itself, thus linked to the greater image of nature, became a vessel of religious awe. Today we know, for the most part, that our laws are not from God or from the universe, but from ourselves; are conventional, not absolute; and that in breaking them we offend not God but man. Neither animals nor plants, not the zodiac or its supposed maker, but our fellows have now become the masters of our fate and we of theirs. In the recent past it may have been possible for intelligent men of good will honestly to believe that their own society (whatever it happened to be) was the only good, that beyond its bounds were the enemies of God, and that they were called upon, consequently, to project the principle of hatred outward upon the world, while cultivating love within, toward those whose “system of sentiments” was of God. Today, however, there is no such outward. Enclaves of national, racial, religious, and class provincialism persist, but the physical facts have made closed horizons illusory. The old god is dead, with his little world and his little, closed society. The new focal center of belief and trust is mankind. And if the principle of love cannot be wakened actually within each — as it was mythologically in God — to master the principle of hate, the Waste Land alone can be our destiny and the masters of the world its fiends.
The fourth function of mythology is to initiate the individual into the order of realities of his own psyche, guiding him toward his own spiritual enrichment and realization. Formerly — but in archaic cultures still — the way was to subordinate all individual judgment, will, and capacities absolutely to the social order: the principle of ego (as we have seen in Oriental Mythology) was to be suppressed and, if possible, even erased; while the archetypes, the ideal roles, of the social order were impressed upon all inexorably, according to their social stations. In a world of static forms, such a massacre of the creative personality was acceptable, and where the archaic mind prevails today such patterning still goes on. One may take it as a point in evidence of the advanced position of Europe in the way of respect for the individual that, whereas Hitler’s massacre of some 5,000,000 Jews evokes (and properly so) horror from all sides, Stalin’s of 25,000,000 Russians passes almost without notice, and the present Chinese orgy is entirely overlooked. Both by the Orient and by the Occident such inhumanity is recognized as normal for the great East, whereas better things are expected of ourselves — and rightly so. For it was in Europe alone that the principle of individual judgment and responsibility was developed in relation not to a fixed order of supposed divine laws, but to a changing context of human actualities, rationally governed. The fostering in Europe, first among the Greeks, then the Romans, of the principle of ego — not as the mere “I will,’’ “I want,” of the nursery (Freud’s “Pleasure Principle”), but as the informed, rational faculty of responsible judgment (“Reality Principle”)Note 2 — has endowed us and our particular world with an order of spirituality and psychological problematic that is different in every way from that of the archaic Oriental mind. And this humanistic individualism has released powers of creativity that have brought about in a mere two centuries changes in the weal and woe of man such as no two millenniums before had ever worked. The result being that where the old patterns of morality are retained they no longer match the actualities even of the local, let alone the world, scene. The adventure of the Grail — the quest within for those creative values by which the Waste Land is redeemed — has become today for each the unavoidable task; for, as there is no more any fixed horizon, there is no more any fixed center, any Mecca, Rome, or Jerusalem. Our circle today is that announced, c. 1450, by Nicolaus Cusanus (1401–1464): whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere; the circle of infinite radius, which is also a straight line.
Hence it will be our charge in the volume next to come, Creative Mythology, to follow systematically from the period of the Table Round (where there was no one sitting at the head, but each was a champion paramount) to the present hour of the detonation of the atom, the long process of the Opening of the Eye of European man to a state that is no state but a becoming: and the vanishment thereby of all the earlier masks of God, which now are known to have been of developing man himself.
Some, perhaps, will desire to bow still to a mask, out of fear of nature. But if there is no divinity in nature, the nature that God created, how should there be in the idea of God, which the nature of man created?
“By my love and hope, I conjure thee,” called Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “cast not away the hero in thy soul!”